One of the most haunting things in Europe is to wander through the funerary art.
In the Vatican museums there were halls crammed and overflowing with the last chiseled testimony to a life that was lived and then lost - the early Christians, the ancient Egyptians, medieval saints. On the wide marble floor of Santa Croce there were carved effigies of the people who had been buried below and for some reason it struck me like a ton of bricks that the swords that lay beside them were there not because they were some sort of fantasy cosplayer, but because they just practically carried a sword around all the time in normal life. Outside of San Miniato there is a crazy, winding, seemingly endless city of all sorts of beautifully carved tombs and mausoleums and they only go back a few centuries. I found a picture perfect little graveyard at the top of a hill in Ireland, under the shadow of grey, medieval Church and some of the gravestones so worn and askew that it was impossible to make out anything of the carvings, they could have been from any era.
But even when it's not specifically funerary art, I'm constantly aware of being in places that have been inhabited consistently for so much longer than I can begin to imagine. There's a quiet and a peace about it, like the culture has seen so many centuries of death that it no longer is such a burden. But it's still a new experience to me.
And with that awareness, especially during Advent, comes the borrowed memory of thousands of years of waiting on the coming of the King called Jesus. Through every variation of darkness, destruction, war, plague, oppression etc. people have called on Christ. And before they had a name, people still suffered and cried out to an unknown God.
And sometimes the specific darkness did past - the Allies won the war, the Black Death ran its course, there were justices enacted and families reunited. But often even when the darkness did pass, it was after enormous suffering and loss.
All this to say, I am part of the people who wait for a King and if you're looking for hard, external evidence, especially in the face of a history of suffering, you might come up with the conclusion that down through the echoing centuries people have waited in vain.
(photo cred to my friend, Claire)
One of the times in St. Peter's I was particularly struck by praying at the spot where he was thought to have been martyred and looking across the quiet marble to the enormous altar built over his bones. I imagined the night when Peter's friends rushed to retrieve his mutilated body from the cross where he died and to try to give some sort of fitting burial to the man who had brought them Christ. I imagined the grief and blood and the little downtrodden community of people who believed in the Resurrection. And I looked around at the solemn pillars and endless circling tourists because the beauty of that place is immeasurable. I tried to imagine what Peter's friends would have thought if they could have known what this place would become and, more importantly, the legacy of faith changing lives for centuries and millennia to come.
I went to another Church called St. Peter in Chains where under the altar they have preserved, not only the chains that Peter was held in while in Rome, but the sarcophagus of the Seven Brothers from the book of Maccabees. For those who don't know, that story is one of the first places in the Old Testament where someone expresses faith in the resurrection.
And the evidence to vindicate the impossible hope of resurrection is not scientific.
But I think, like with many things, that the answer has to be found in the specifics. The Victory took place two thousand years ago and time and space can make it difficult to trust. But the victories that it triggers are individual, personal, intimate. I can look from a cold distance at the history of suffering in the world and think that this hope I hold must be a fairy tale. But when I look at the reality of my life, the loves I have been given, the Love I constantly bump against that has undeniably shaped and changed me, the whole image flips. And its born out in the other individual stories that I can see enough of to have some idea.
"At midnight, in Bethlehem, in the piercing cold" as the old prayer says. The whole world was suffering and He was born in only one place, one time. But it was so He could become flesh. Individual, personal, intimate. The way that love always has to be.
Like Bono said:
“I remember coming back from a very long tour…. On Christmas Eve I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. …It had dawned on me before, but it really sank in: the Christmas story. The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty… a child, I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry. Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and …tears came down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this. Because that’s exactly what we were talking about earlier: love needs to find form, intimacy needs to be whispered. To me, it makes sense. It’s actually logical. It’s pure logic. Essence has to manifest itself. It’s inevitable. Love has to become an action or something concrete. It would have to happen. There must be an incarnation. Love must be made flesh.”
It's a grim and grand thing to celebrate Advent under the shadow of centuries. It's beautiful and it has been a gift. But it points to the perfect end to this pilgrimage - a coming home to my specific and less grand home of Milwaukee, WI, where Christ is made flesh in the people I love.
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